Entertainment

How Massive Was the Chilean Miners’ Rescue Online? [STATS]

Broadcasts of the Chilean miners' rescue broke television and online audience records between Tuesday afternoon (ET) on October 12 — when news first broke that the rescue was set to begin the following day — and midnight ET Wednesday, October 13, a few hours after the last victim was pulled from the mine.

Global news traffic hit a two-year high at 4,052,459 page viewers per minute at around 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, while TV viewership in the U.S. peaked during primetime (between 8 and 9 p.m., roughly) on Wednesday evening.

Social media buzz peaked at about the same time as T.V. viewership; approximately 104,000 messages per hour were sent via Twitter that contained one of the six top keywords related to the rescue, indicating that many turned to social media platforms to discuss the news they were watching on TV.

We've broken down the numbers a bit further below.

TV Viewership

Viewership more than doubled on several major broadcast networks as the last miner was rescued during primetime Wednesday evening, 69 days after becoming trapped in a collapsed gold and copper mine.

Between roughly 8:15 and 9 p.m., Fox News attracted a viewing audience of 7.1 million — nearly 2.4 times the audience it normally attracts during The O'Reilly Factor, which runs during that hour; 2.7 million viewers followed events on CNN during the same period. It was the greatest number of viewers the former had hooked since Election Day 2008.

More than 6.8 million people tuned in to BBC's 24-hour news channel when the first of the miners reached the surface, The Guardianreports.

Online Traffic

Traffic to major online news outlets was bolstered by news of the rescue throughout Tuesday and Wednesday as well. At 5:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Akamai's Net Usage News Index (which monitors real-time global news consumption from more than 100 major news portals) recorded the fifth largest spike in global news traffic — 4,052,459 page viewers per minute — since it began tracking in August 2005. The spike occurred shortly after officials said that rescue operations would begin the next day. The peak traffic number falls just below that seen on the day of Barack Obama's election to the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008, which amassed 4,286,021 page views per minute.

Liz Bradley, a spokesperson for Akamai, attributed the increased traffic to "significant improvements in the quality of online video and a growing level of activity on social networks," among other things.

CNN alone delivered 5.5 million live video streams and 109.4 million page views between 3 p.m. ET on Tuesday until midnight ET the following day. On Wednesday, CNN.com served 4.6 million live streams — up 8,000% from the daily average, and the highest day so far this year — and 82.5 million page views, the greatest number since Obama's inauguration, and 50% above normal. Some 2.2 million viewers accessed CNN via mobile devices, 32% higher than the average.

The BBC attracted a total online audience of roughly 8 million via its live video and blog feed, according to The Guardian. Spanish news portal Noticias Univision garnered 23.3 million page views across 3.7 million visits to its online and mobile sites on Tuesday and Wednesday, shattering the previous site visit record set on November 4, 2008.

Elsewhere, news audiences turned to The Huffington Post, USA Today and CBS, each of which also hosted live video streams alongside live blogs (The Huffington Post ran its live blog for 36 hours). MSNBC, The Guardian and Reuters liveblogged the rescue as well. The New York Times continually updated its front page along with photos, and a team of volunteers kept Wikipedia updated in real time, along with a chart that listed the names, ages, nationalities and rescue times of each of the miners.

Social Media Buzz

Social media platforms were likewise ablaze with activity during the rescue. The word "chile," was mentioned approximately 252,000 times on Tuesday and another 412,000 on Wednesday (for a total of 667,000), according to social media measurement platform Trendrr. Those numbers only represent a fraction of the total figure, as many mentions of the event used words like "miners," "rescue" and "men" in hundreds of languages to refer to the incident.

A measurement taken of the top six terms (chile, miners, chilean, rescue, pinera and feurzamineros) in a 10-hour span beginning Wednesday afternoon recorded 647,000 mentions, peaking at 104,000 tweets per hour at around 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday, as illustrated in the chart above.

The sentiment of tweets containing the word "chile" were slightly more negative than the average, which usually hovers around 12-15%, Trendrr told us. Some accused the miners of "cashing in" on their newfound publicity, while others complained about how the rescue dominated news cycles all week

On YouTube, 16,100 new videos tagged "chile" and "miners" appeared by Thursday.

There was a significant jump in Google search results for the top six terms — from approximately 243 million to a little more than 600 million from Tuesday through Friday — as well.

What's perhaps most interesting is so many consumers went online even during TV's biggest nightly hour — and that much of that audience went to social networking platforms like Twitter.

This observation correlates with a March study from Nielsen that found that 60% of TV viewers in the U.S. with Internet access (roughly 134 million people) use both mediums at the same time at least once per month. Increasingly, consumers are turning to the social web to discuss the news and shows they watch on TV, because it's proven the most effective medium for them to do so.

Tell us: How did you follow and discuss news of the Chilean miners' rescue?

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